Select Local Merchants

SailTime Chicago is the local franchise of SailTime, a fast growing worldwide boating company. We provide our members access to cruising class sail and power boats. The best way to say it: we have fun.

Be Active Outdoors organizes physical and recreational activities for adults and children of all fitness levels. Regular events challenge locals to break their sedentary habits with 10-mile bike rides, lessons on revitalizing waterways, and group adventure races. An annual river-basin tournament combines a focus on conservation with thrilling paddleboat and shoreline fishing. The Amped Up Adventure race complicates traditional adventure racing with urban elements including biking, running, paddling, and an obstacle course to get people moving in their home environments.

Raging Buffalo's adrenaline junkies have turned their athletic addiction into a successful enterprise by offering snowboarding and wakeboarding lessons to beginners and experienced riders. In the summer, their instructors take to the wake for lessons that start at the wakeboard school?open since 2001?before taking students on 15-minute riding sessions. When winter comes, the instructors dry-dock their boards in local bear caves and show students how to navigate the drifts with snowboard lessons at their ski park, which opened in 1992. Additionally, Raging Buffalo plays host to a variety of events, from rail jams to USASA competitions.

Situated on Bangs Lake, Wauconda Boat is a full-service marina with certified and master technicians on staff. In addition to renting out paddleboards, kayaks, and pontoon boats, Wauconda Boat can also supply boat motors, parts, and mermaid repellent.

The die-hard paddlers of Geneva Kayak Center stay on the move throughout the year?both in their watercraft and across the globe. From May to September, they are headquartered in and around Chicago, where they teach kayaking during courses, workshops, and quick orientations, and dole out kayaks, canoes, and tubes for those who want to explore the Fox River's whitewater on their own.
When cold breezes start to blow through the Windy City, they head to Saint Marys, Georgia, to lead kayak camps and sea adventures on the Cumberland Island National Seashore. They also lead curated adventures off the costs of Alaska and Maine and in Wisconsin's idyllic Door County, where kayakers might spot deer grazing on grass or nibbling on cheese curds.

Size is no object at SkipperBud's, where all forms of aquatic fun line their shelves, from water-wings on up to yachts. Though the shop doesn't actually line the walls with multi-ton vessels, it does store smaller recreational vehicles in dry stack, pulling entire boats off high shelves with an enormous, specially outfitted forklift. Inside the store proper, staff keeps neat displays of more conventionally-sized gear, including watersporting apparel such as skis and life vests to boating accessories, such as anchors and bumper stickers to slap on the bottom of a ship's hull that say, "If you can read this, you are a really smart fish."
To keep boaters covered in the office, SkipperBud's deals in a variety of storage and maintenance packages. They shield private vessels from the elements during winter months in vast warehouses, and perform tune-ups and major repairs to engines and fiberglass hulls.